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Do you travel on airplanes? Most of the newer ones are fly-by-wire now.

O.K. I exaggerated slightly but:
Software Bug Halts F22 Flight There are indications that fly-by-wire contributed to or caused crashes of an FA18 and some commercial Airbus planes which is why, unlike Airbus, Boeing designs allow the pilot to override fly-by-wire.
By the same token, ever since the Therac 25 deaths, there are FDC regulations preventing certain medical devices from being completely under software control (CT scanners, radiation therapy machines...) This is a good thing. Moore's law has allowed us to create software of a complexity that is either beyond what any human can understand and effectively test. Many eyes helps but QA doesn't really get the respect in opensource communities that development does and many commercial companies see QA as an unnecessary expense. Look for more accidental failures as companies trim their investment in quality during these difficult economic times.

"I think that MS's behavior is only seen as anti-competitive because they happen to own such a massive share of the market" anonymous astroturfer

'Microsoft's conduct over the last two decades has demonstrated Microsoft's willingness and ability to engage in unlawful conduct to protect and extend its core monopolies'

'The only real difference between Microsoft's more recent practices and its earlier ones is that, as Mr. Gates predicted, Microsoft has now changed its document retention practices'

"do not archive your mail. 30 days .. This is not something that you get to decide. This is company policy"

'Btw, I'm a Linux user .. and IMO linux has a ways to go before it's "desktop-ready"', anonymous astroturfer

Sure you are, and what can't 'Linux' do yet for the average user, email, browsing, typing and viewing videos.

That was 9 years, then NASA quickly merged into an over-engineered, sluggish beast that still managed to blow up the Challenger by not listening to the line engineers...

First, it's somewhat actually more. Sputnik, for example, was launched in 1957 and the US was launching prior to that point. The pressure stopped in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. So it's not surprising that future efforts don't show the same urgency present in the early space program.

You seem to be thinking of "grindingly persistent".

No, I'm not. I really don't know why you seem to think this. Anyway getting back to the original story, the thing to remember is that the nuclear weapon bureaucracy was in a big hurry for several decades. Among other things, this meant that clean up was very sloppy and hurried. If a mess were made, it had to be disposed of quickly. I gather record keeper was similarly sloppy. There was a story recently about plutonium found in a jug in Hanford which was thought to be from the second oldest batch of plutonium ever made. Somehow it ended up in an unmarked safe in a dump in Hanford. It's one thing to dispose of dangerous waste in a criminal manner and another to dispose of near bomb grade plutonium in that way. I see this sort of weirdness as more indication of the haste with which the nuclear weapons program was conducted.

Amazon has released more information. Apparently it was user error, 57 310 books were de-listed, and they are working to restore their ranks. This sounds to me to be fairly accurate; were it a deliberate policy change with an eye to being "family-friendly", it wouldn't make sense to do it covertly. After all, they would want to attract new customers to replace the ones alienated.